Drugs designed to choke off blood to brain tumors often fail, and two new studies published online in the journal Nature help explain why. Tumor cells may be bypassing the drugs by morphing into blood vessels, thus creating their own blood supply. This ScienceNOW article gives us a window into the lab experiments that confirmed this, along with a possible solution for preventing these cells from maturing. (Jocelyn Kaiser, ScienceNOW)

Science Daily reports on new images of an oddball dying star surrounded by fluorescing gas and rings. It’s described here as “a glowing jellyfish floating at the bottom of a dark, speckled sea,” and has been captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. (Science Daily)

Juliet Eilperin writes here about a new book on preserving the world’s cool rainforests, which host scores of species and serve as carbon sinks. The news hook is the run-up to the U.N. Climate Talks in Cancun, Mexico, later this month. The book, Eilperin says, “documents that in 2007, the 250 million acres of temperate and high-latitude forests stored 196 gigatons of carbon — the equivalent of six times the amount of carbon dioxide humans emit each year by burning fossil fuels.” (Juliet Eilperin, Post Carbon blog, The Washington Post)

This story starts with a piece of hail the size of cantaloupe. The article goes on to detail South Dakota’s long run of extreme weather this year — hail storms, tornadoes, blizzards, floods — and likens the string of natural disasters to a plague of grasshoppers. Climate change is indirectly raised as a possible culprit, but no answers here on how it fits in. (A.G. Sulzberger, The New York Times)

PBS NewsHour allows open commenting for all registered users, and encourages discussion amongst you, our audience. However, if a commenter violates our terms of use or abuses the commenting forum, their comment may go into moderation or be removed entirely. We reserve the right to remove posts that do not follow these basic guidelines: comments must be relevant to the topic of the post; may not include profanity, personal attacks or hate speech; may not promote a business or raise money; may not be spam. Anything you post should be your own work. The PBS NewsHour reserves the right to read on the air and/or publish on its website or in any medium now known or unknown the comments or emails that we receive. By submitting comments, you agree to the PBS Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which include more details.